Movement Health with Sparta Science CEO Phil Wagner, MD

Our bodies were made to move, but how can technology help us move smarter? In this episode, we talk to Sparta Science CEO Phil Wagner, MD about simplifying movement data and the impact it can have on our overall health. Find out the ways your doctor might analyze movement health and what it could mean for the future of healthcare.

Make sure you like and subscribe to "For Startups, By Physicians" wherever you get your podcasts. And keep up with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium at @InflectHealth, and on the web at InflectHealth.com.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Lindsay Kriger: Hey everyone. This is Lindsay Kriger, director at Inflect Health, the innovation hub of Vituity, where we strive to be a catalyst for better care. I'm thrilled to be hosting For Startups by Physicians where we share insights and guidance to healthcare startups and technologists looking to create the future of health.

[00:00:18] Lindsay Kriger: As a physician-founded firm, we have connections with clinicians and intimate knowledge of what they need and how they work. We will be interviewing our executives, frontline providers, and industry leaders to help your business be effective and scale. Thanks for joining and let's get going.

[00:00:33] Lindsay Kriger: Hi everyone. Welcome. My name is Lindsay Kriger. We are looking forward to the conversation around movement as medicine. We're here with Dr. Phil Wagner and Andrew Smith to have a really insightful conversation. 

[00:00:48] Lindsay Kriger: Andrew is our President of Inflect Health, as well as the Chief Operations and Innovation Officer at Vituity. He's responsible for driving innovative businesses, thus disrupt the status [00:01:00] quo and transform the healthcare construct. In addition to spearheading our innovative investments, partnerships and strategies, he also serves as a board member for the Vituity Cares foundation, which is a great philanthropic arm of the enterprise. 

[00:01:15] Lindsay Kriger: And we're also joined by Phil Wagner, the CEO of Sparta Science, one of Inflect's portfolio companies. Dr. Phil Wagner is founder, CEO of Sparta Science, a physician and a strength coach whose own athletic career as a football and rugby player was shortcut by a series of unavoidable training injuries. Dr. Wagner's commitment to data-driven coaching and athletic development began as a strength coach at UC Berkeley, and UCLA, and as a professional rugby coach in New Zealand. We'll have to hear more about that. 

[00:01:48] Lindsay Kriger: Phil received his medical degree from USC focused on biomechanics. Phil's passion for protecting athlete health and longevity through injury resilience coupled with [00:02:00] his medically oriented human performance mindset has inspired him to found Sparta Science, and we are looking forward to this conversation.

[00:02:07] Lindsay Kriger: Phil, thank you for being here. Andrew, thank you for being here today. And we're gonna jump right into our topic. 

[00:02:14] Lindsay Kriger: So Phil, tell us a little bit about Sparta Science, how you founded it, what really drives you to be the CEO. 

[00:02:24] Phil Wagner: What drives me is this idea that movement is so powerful at every stage of our life and really affects not just disease chronically but also just how we experience life in terms of the quality of what we're able to do or not able to do, and take all that into account the idea that there's not a very quick and easy way to actually measure how you move. Am I moving better? Am I not moving? And so we're left with this issue of we're gonna use age or we'll use [00:03:00] history. If you're injured, if you fall, you're likely to fall again. You're likely to get injured. So how can we have more leading metrics and leading things that allow all of us to understand how we move differently because we're all different individuals and what can we do to really continue to move without pain and without fear? 

[00:03:20] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah. It's such an important topic, especially as longevity and aging becomes such a hot topic, so to speak, in the wellness industry. Tell us a little bit about the Sparta platform and what you guys are doing to use data and analytics to drive that story.

[00:03:36] Phil Wagner: When we started to look at a lot of the research behind fitness, performance and injuries, a lot of the patterns kept coming up that it's how you interact with the ground that ultimately determines a large part of your movement. And so that we started to think about, okay, a lot of the times that type of information is gathered by what's called a [00:04:00] force plate, which is basically the size of a bathroom scale, maybe a little bit larger, but the challenge is it tends to exist only in labs because it produces so much data that it requires really high level researchers and experts to really start trimming that data down, mining it, and then providing the insights. Sparta really is a platform that's able to capture all that granular information and distill it down in real time into things that are actionable, both for the practitioner, but also for the patient or the individual in terms of, okay, here's how I move now. What can I do to improve that movement, whether I'm injured or healthy? 

[00:04:46] Lindsay Kriger: Andrew, I'm curious. We see a lot of companies come through. We know that the healthcare industry has radically transformed in terms of the data and information and insights that it gathers. From your [00:05:00] perspective, what are you most excited about in this data-driven approach to movement? 

[00:05:06] Andrew Smith: I also realized after listening to Phil's bio that I probably should have put that I played like a year and a half of high school football in my bio. But Phil's sports background is so impressive and mine is not.

[00:05:17] Andrew Smith: But I think after meeting Phil and seeing Sparta understanding like how little we know about movement, but the potential and the millions and millions of data points. It just seems almost endless in what we can learn about our physical health, our mental health, when we think about neurological disorders, mental health disorders, physical injuries.

[00:05:40] Andrew Smith: My wife in one year had two knee surgeries, got pregnant and had a cyst removed. And understanding like what was going on with her body and knees and all this kind of stuff was really difficult. And I remember thinking like physical therapy wasn't enough and seeing how much progress she was making, and I thought, [00:06:00] man, something like this Sparta play could help everyone from my wife to fall prevention in the hospital to Parkinson's disease. And I was immediately obsessed, like I get often with something really special, but seeing it in action really is what sold us. 

[00:06:12] Andrew Smith: So when we got on the plate and saw it and Dr. Rick Newell was having an Achilles issue and an the plate immediately called that out and was like, Hey, you need to stop running and lift weights for a little while and get this rehabbed. It just, I think one day there's gonna be as Sparta Science in everyone's home, and that's gonna impact our daily lives based on the science of movement.

[00:06:33] Lindsay Kriger: Phil, from a consumer perspective, we're inundated with data and information all the time, and most of us are like, eh, I don't know how to understand any of this. What is your philosophy and how is Sparta really trying to simplify all of these data points and all this information into something actionable for the consumer?

[00:06:52] Phil Wagner: Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah. I think a lot of times people assume that our name comes from the movie "300" from that, it's like, [00:07:00] Hey, let's go, let's be really hardcore. But it's, it really actually comes from the word spartan, and to be simple, right? And how do we distill things down to really the simpliest insights that allow folks to take action. Because that is a challenge right now in that there's so much information, there's so many technologies, there's so many options that patients/ consumers are really being inundated with on a daily basis. And we see a lot of things happening there where a lot of times folks are driving with a brake on and that they're doing things that help them, but they're also doing things that they think they should be doing that's actually hurting them.

[00:07:43] Phil Wagner: On the flip side, I think sometimes when there's so much information like that, it does tend to cause paralysis. As well, and that there's so much information that I'm just gonna do what I've always done. The idea is that we could provide a very clear picture for individuals to take [00:08:00] action, should they choose, of what types of activities they want to pursue, and then also what type of activities support that pursuit. Because a lot of times if you do want to go running, as Andrew mentioned, there might be other things you need to do to supplement that. And a lot of times it's probably things you don't like to do. So we look at it like medicine: how do we find the minimal therapeutic dose? If you don't like lifting weights, what's like the one weight exercise you should, right? If you don't like running, what's the one running distance you should do? 

[00:08:35] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah, and that's one thing that we love so much about you as a founder, is that you're also a physician and on this podcast, and so much of what Inflect does, is try to remind startups and technologists and founders, like being a clinician, being on the care delivery side of things is really different than being on the tech forward side of things. So you have the advantage of really doing both, and that's such an [00:09:00] exciting and unique space that you live in. 

[00:09:02] Lindsay Kriger: How do you distill as a clinician that information down, and how has that impacted the design of what you guys are doing at Sparta?

[00:09:11] Phil Wagner: Most health systems, most practitioners, clinicians, there's a fear of one more thing, right? They're already doing so much and certainly COVID has only increased that and the, I guess the biggest awareness that we always have is, how can we seamlessly fit into a workflow, whether that's the individual's life or the clinic workflow, how can we seamlessly fit in?

[00:09:37] Phil Wagner: So really, the technology becomes invisible, if you will. And so that's where having a footprint, the workflow, just like weighing in, is really powerful as a message of no, you don't need to do anything different. And the same time it takes to weigh in, you can do this quick assessment and you get body weight, but you also get a million other data points [00:10:00] which you can track over time and then start to understand how you move.

[00:10:04] Phil Wagner: So it's really understanding how workloads are happening in everyday life and in clinics and trying to fit within that rather than trying to change it. 

[00:10:14] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah, absolutely. We talk so much about change management. Andrew, I have the good fortune of knowing you pretty well. I know you spent 20 plus years working inside of the hospital walls.

[00:10:23] Lindsay Kriger: Tell us a little bit about, from your perspective, how you think technology is influencing the care delivery setting, and is there too much technology? Is there just too much ask of healthcare right now? And how do we create that balance between the opportunities of the future and the demands of today?

[00:10:42] Andrew Smith: Yeah. I have spent many moons in the hospital and I think technology's obviously gonna be making and creating new opportunities for healthcare to improve always. So it's gonna win no matter what in my opinion. The difficult thing is hospitals are slow [00:11:00] to adapt. They want every single data piece absolutely secured, then sent to their E M R, then analyzed there, then sent back somewhere else and all that becomes extremely complex.

[00:11:11] Andrew Smith: But the one thing that really struck me with Sparta is getting a hospital to change is very difficult or clinics to change or primary care, but the plate is just a little bit larger than a scale that's in every single doctor's office, clinic, urgent care and hospital room, basically, in the entire country. And so the idea that could get, actually get put into the workflow with the clinicians at the site and not really obstruct anything they're already doing, but get a lot more data from it and then actually give them something meaningful — fall prevention or something else is going on with this patient that I can't understand and all I had to do was basically get them to stand on this scale for 20 seconds. Really, I think separates Sparta from a lot of other things that you try to induce into the health system. So [00:12:00] it's like right there, the workflow could be just as simple as they have right now with a lot better data and outcomes. So anytime someone's bringing a solution like that, I think it's a lot easier to get it into our, to our system.

[00:12:14] Lindsay Kriger: And speaking of, we're so excited about this partnership with Spartan, some of our outpatient medicine clinics. 

[00:12:19] Lindsay Kriger: Andrew, maybe talk a little bit about what we're hoping to do and then Phil, we can get your perspective on how we can help grow the company and what an investor like Inflect can do for startups that are really trying to crack into this.

[00:12:35] Andrew Smith: Yeah, isn't it? That's a great question. Thanks for asking it. And we just had a grand opening of one of our clinics in Nevada and we brought the Sparta plate and there was a line of 50 people to get on. Every single person that came through the door got on the plate. All the providers, the security guard, everyone was super into it.

[00:12:51] Andrew Smith: And I was too when I first saw it. And what, so our vision really is that when you want to be your healthiest self, we think movement [00:13:00] is a key part of it, and so we would like to offer a concierge package of you have your primary care physician, but you get on the Sparta plate as well. It tells you maybe you need to work whatever your goals are for your health. But like what? For me, I wanna live as long as I can to see my kids grow up, right? And spend time with my family. But I also want to be active. And what do I need to do? Do I have potential injuries? Is am I doing too much weights, too much running, whatever, and how does that compliment the lab panels that my primary care doctor has?

[00:13:30] Andrew Smith: So it's this vision of it being a movement is a major part of how you're gonna live your best life or get back to playing a sport or recover or reduce back pain, whatever the thing is, specific to what you want, we wanna offer that when you come through and the plate is a huge part of that. 

[00:13:49] Lindsay Kriger: Phil, hopefully you feel like Inflect is, has been helpful, but really what do you feel like having access to more physicians, more clinicians, [00:14:00] more sort of boots on the ground, direct to consumer markets. What has that done for Sparta? What are you hoping to do in the future? 

[00:14:09] Phil Wagner: Yeah, I think the biggest interest that really drew me to Inflect was a lot of the leaders have experience on the emergency medicine side as clinicians, and that is so much about triage. How can you, very quickly assess somebody and their severity and triage appropriately. And I think that's really part of our vision is a lot of times to triage accurately and quickly that's where technology can really shine. And so no matter where it is in the clinic and the emergency room, can we provide a tool that can aid clinicians in triaging people to wherever they need to be, whether that's long-term health or referring out to different specialists. [00:15:00] And so that was a really big interesting piece that, because it really matched with our idea of like, how do we fit as a node in a decision tree to help guide clinicians and patients down different paths. 

[00:15:15] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah. Getting earlier upfront in the process. 

[00:15:18] Phil Wagner: Absolutely. 

[00:15:19] Lindsay Kriger: And reducing the complexities later on where you thought, oh, if I had just been told this six months ago, I could have prevented all this acute other injury potentially. 

[00:15:29] Phil Wagner: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that type of perspective and use case with Inflect is really helping inform us how we can try to mirror that with other health systems, both from a messaging standpoint, but also from an actual workflow within its clinics. 

[00:15:48] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah, the health systems are so interesting and such an exciting space to work in because so many of them want to engage patients or customers outside of the walls of those traditional [00:16:00] areas. And this is definitely one technology and process that we really feel can engage and connect with people pre or posted acute.

[00:16:09] Lindsay Kriger: As we get close on time, Phil, I'm wondering if you have any anecdotes or any sort of stories from the front lines that you're really proud of or wanna share with the audience today? 

[00:16:20] Phil Wagner: Yeah, I think back to the, original points we were talking about, movement being so powerful. I think one of the more surprising anecdotes that we have is if we're going in this space thinking a lot of our work is in sports and the military. We're gonna really focus on physical therapy and sports medicine because it really matches where we started. But we've really quickly grown into falls because it is such a large problem, and it's also one that's fairly concrete in that, hey, if we reduce falls, we can reduce all the other comorbidities. 

[00:16:58] Phil Wagner: The other area that's really exciting is, [00:17:00] a few months ago, we got a call from West Side Children's Hospital, and they said, look, we've got autistic children and one of our problems are they have a lot of toe walking that occurs that eventually, if serious enough requires cutting the heel cord, the Achilles, breaking the foot, casting it. And besides her being painful, it's also incredibly time and financially.

[00:17:26] Phil Wagner: And so they brought us in to help guide and identify some of those needs more upstream, and I think the exciting piece for us is just, it's just a great signal that aid movement is so expansive in terms of the needs of it and the impact it can have really at any age and any condition. 

[00:17:49] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah, the exciting thing about what technology can bring to health is the multi-generational aspect of who's using technology these days, right, compared to [00:18:00] 10, 15 years ago. So that is really exciting. 

[00:18:02] Lindsay Kriger: As we close out, Andrew, I would love to just hear your thoughts on where you want to take movement as medicine and where you think the industry should focus and how we should engage with our tech partners as a clinician organization in creating the right type of technology that, that people really will end up.

[00:18:22] Andrew Smith: Yeah, thanks. Where we're headed with this is, Inflect is gonna build an entire direct to consumer health and wellness product clinic. And I think the biggest challenge and why I like Sparta so much is what's it gonna take to get someone engaged in their own health, walk through the front door, and then follow up at home for the next six or nine months before we see them again?

[00:18:43] Andrew Smith: And are we gonna be available to them for lots of things. There's the more primary care side, but there's exercise movement, diet, mental health, sleep, all of these things play a role in our health and what I think the people that are gonna win in the future are the folks that [00:19:00] create solutions that actually get you engaged in taking control of your own healthcare and your own wellness and your own mental health.

[00:19:07] Andrew Smith: And that's gonna be extremely noisy because lots of apps and technology is gonna get thrown at it. But some people are gonna figure this. And the coolest thing about Sparta, I think, is you can see your progress being developed. You can get back on the plate and see if you've gotten somewhere and if you feel better, or if your back is less stiff or you're stronger or you're back to playing tennis in retirement, all those kinds of things, you see the outcome and you're trying to live the best life you can. And I think that motivates all of us as humans. So I think that's really the future, and I think Sparta's an important part of that. 

[00:19:43] Lindsay Kriger: Great. Thank you both so much for your conversation, your thoughts. If anyone wants to get more information about Sparta, the plate, Inflect Health, please check us out online and we look forward to a long wonderful working relationship.

[00:19:58] Lindsay Kriger: Thanks again to you both. [00:20:00]

[00:20:00] Phil Wagner: Thank you. 

[00:20:01] Andrew Smith: Thanks, Lindsay. 

[00:20:03] Lindsay Kriger: Thanks for joining us, and again, I'm Lindsay Kriger, director at Inflect Health. Here at Inflect, the future of medicine care and health delivery is not just ripe for disruption. it's increasingly personalized, accessible, and human. Make sure you like and subscribe to For Startups by Physicians wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:20:24] Lindsay Kriger: And keep up with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium at @InflectHealth and on the web at InflectHealth.com.